The telephone industry currently offers its craftspersons a variety of impact tool configurations for cutting and seating telephone wires in terminal blocks mounted to telephone office mainframe units. Non-limiting examples of documentation describing a variety of such impact tools include U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,195,230, 4,696,090, 4,567,639, and 4,241,496 and the patents cited therein. A typical mechanically operated impact tool has a generally longitudinal handle from which a wire-gripping and cutting head extends. The interior of the handle houses an axially translatable hammer element, which is biased by a compression spring to strike the cutting head, and cut a wire that has been inserted into a wire capture and gripping end region of the cutting head.
To operate the impact tool, the craftsperson firmly grips the tool's handle and pushes it by hand against a wire in a terminal receptacle. This moves a hammer release element within the handle into alignment with the hammer travel path, so that an impact force stored in a main compression spring is mechanically released against the hammer. This rapidly propels the hammer toward and into impact with the cutting head, causing the end of the wire to be cut and become seated in the terminal. Because the force imparted by the impact tool to the wire terminal is leveraged against and thereby imparts a recoil shock to the craftsperson's hand, frequent repeated use of the tool may lead to hand and wrist fatigue.